Taking the “modern system” to sea: The past and future of naval power in industrial war

Abstract

This article applies Stephen Biddle’s “modern system” to naval war in the industrial era, c. 1860–1918. Biddle doubts his model’s transferability beyond continental/land warfare. A historical perspective suggests otherwise. Beginning in the 1860 s, navies—even earlier than armies—confronted industrial firepower and adapted accordingly. Submarines, torpedo boats, cruisers and eventually aircraft all relied on the “modern system” principles of cover and concealment, maneuver and combined arms to survive and perform useful missions. Today, concepts like “distributed lethality” have precedents in a “maritime modern system”—one undercurrent in naval history that is increasingly relevant.

Acknowledgments

This article was produced with support from the Clements Center for National Security, University of Texas-Austin and the Naval Postgraduate School, Defense Analysis Department Research Initiation Program.

Disclosure statement

The views expressed do not reflect the position of the Naval Postgraduate School or Department of Defense.

Notes

1 Stephen Biddle, Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). For a roundtable, see: Stephen Biddle, “Military Power: A Reply,” Journal of Strategic Studies (2005) 28, no. 3: 453–469.

2 Biddle, Military Power, 23–25. See also: B. H. Liddell Hart, Strategy, 2nd Revised Edition (London: Faber & Faber Ltd., 1967), 187–204.

3 As case Biddle made earlier in: Stephen Biddle, “The Gulf War Debate Redux: Why Skill and Technology are the Right Answer,” International Security, 22, no. 2 (Fall, 1997): 163–174. For economically deterministic arguments see: Jurgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 394; Pomeranz, Kenneth, The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers (New York: Random House, 1987), 144; Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire (New York: Random House, 1987), 59. For “technologically determinist” arguments see: Bernard Brodie, Sea Power in the Machine Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941); William H. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); Karl Lautenschlager, “Technology and the Evolution of Naval Warfare,” in Naval Strategy and National Security, ed. Steven E. Miller and Stephen Van Evera (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988), 173–221.

4 Stephen Biddle and Ivan Oelrich, “Future Warfare in the Western Pacific: Chinese Antiaccess/Area Denial, U.S. AirSea Battle, and Command of the Commons in East Asia.” International Security 41, no. 1 (2016): 11.

5 Foxhall Parker, Squadron Tactics Under Steam (New York: V. Nostrand, 1863).

6 For Jomini see: Mahan on Naval Warfare: Selections from the Writings of Rear Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan, ed. Allan Westcott (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1918), 49. For “Napoleon” see: Mahan on Naval Warfare, 14, 55. See also: A.T. Mahan, Naval Strategy: Compared and Contrasted with the Principles and Practice of Military Operations on Land (London: Sampson Low, Marston & Company, 1911). For advocacy of sea power see: Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1890); Margaret Tuttle Sprout, “Mahan: Evangelist of Sea Power,” in Makers of Modern Strategy: Military Thought from Machiavelli to Hitler, ed. Edward Mead Earle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1943).

7 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848 (London: Phoenix, 1962); Charles Maier, Leviathan 2.0: Inventing Modern Statehood (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). Though Biddle has company in identifying WWI as a paradigmatic break in the making of modern war. See: Jonathan B.A. Bailey, “The First World War and the Birth of Modern Warfare,” in The Dynamics of Military Revolution, 1300–2050, ed. MacGregor Knox and Williamson Murray (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 132.

8 Wilfred Owen, “Anthem for Doomed Youth,” The New Oxford Book of English Verse, ed. Helen Gardner, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 900. For colonial violence, see: David Silbey, A War of Frontier and Empire: The Philippine American War, 1899–1902 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007); Paul Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, and the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 218–219. True for air power as well in the interwar years. See: Air Chief Marshal Portal, “Air Force Cooperation in Policing the Empire,” Journal of the Royal United Services Institution (London, May 1937), 343–358. The absence of serious discussion of guerrilla war and terrorism as an antidote to industrial firepower is another (deliberate) omission.

9 For “storm of steel,” see: Ernst Jünger, The Storm of Steel: From the Diary of a German Storm-Troop Officer on the Western Front (London: Chatto & Windus, 1929). For “castles of steel,” see: Robert K. Massie, Castles of Steel: Britain, Germany, and the Winning of the Great War at Sea (New York: Random House, 2003).

10 Biddle, Military Power, 30.

11 W.L. White, They Were Expendable (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1942), 1.

12 Julian S. Corbett, Some Principles of Maritime Strategy (London: Longmans, Green and Co. 1918), 7.

13 Biddle, Military Power, 30. See also: Michael Howard, “Men against Fire: Expectations of War in 1914,” International Security, 9, no. 1, 1984, 41.

14 Biddle, Military Power, 269 no. 86.

15 Ibid.

16 Wayne Hughes, Fleet Tactics: Theory and Practice (Annapolis, Naval Institute Press, 1986), 40–43; Frederick W. Lanchester, “Mathematics in Warfare,” in The World of Mathematics, ed. James Newman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956).

17 Capt. P.H. Colomb, “Naval War Game,” (1879), National Archives and Records Administration [hereafter NARA-1], RG-45, Box 453. See later: Vice Admiral P.H. Colomb, Naval Warfare: Its Ruling Principles and Practice Historically Treated (London: W.H. Allen & Co., 1895).

18 Jason Smith, To Master the Boundless Sea: The U.S. Navy, the Marine Environment, and the Cartography of Empire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018).

19 Capt. Chatfield RN, as used in V.E. Tarrant, Jutland: The German Perspective (London: Arms and Armour, 1995), 78. See also: John Keegan, The First World War (New York: Knopf, 1999), 270.

20 Nicholas Rankin, A Genius for Deception: How Cunning Helped the British Win Two World Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 129.

21 Andrew Rhodes, “Thinking in Space: The Role of Geography in National Security Decision-Making,” Texas National Security Review, August 2019, Volume II, Issue 4, 101.

22 Bodie D. Dykstra, “‘To Dig and Burrow like Rabbits’: British Field Fortifications at the Battle of the Aisne, September to October 1914,” Journal of Military History, July 2020, 84 Issue 3, 747–773.

23 “Low Observability” platforms, like the Boeing Super Hornet share commonalities with “stealth” weapons but are generally more easily detected by radar. See, “How Stealthy is Boeing’s New Super Hornet,” Defense News, April 8, 2018, accessed June 3, 2020 https://www.defensenews.com/digital-show-dailies/navy-league/2018/04/09/how-stealthy-is-boeings-new-super-hornet/

24 Watt Stewart, “Federico Blume’s Peruvian Submarine,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 28, no. 3 (Aug., 1948): 468–78; “Work of Submarine Boats of the CSN,” Southern Historical Society Papers [hereafter SHSP] Vol XXX, 1902, 164.

25 John Keegan, A History of Warfare (New York: Vintage, 1993), 67–69. With some exceptions from the WWII era: the Battle of Midway, the hunt for the Bismarck, and the Battle of the Atlantic.

26 Elliot Carlson, Joe Rochefort’s War: The Odyssey of the Codebreaker who Outwitted Yamamoto at Midway (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2011); Frederick Winterbotham, The Ultra Secret (New York: Harper & Row, 1974). Or even more suggestive, popular dramatizations in the movies Midway (1976) and The Imitation Game (2014). For a contrary view, see: John Keegan, Intelligence in War (London: Hutchinson, 2003), 231.

27 Corbett, Some Principles of Naval Warfare, 114. Mahan—taking his cue from Jomini—was still more earnest about the principle of concentration. See: Mahan, Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 414. See also: Philip Crowl, “Alfred Thayer Mahan: The Naval Historian,” in Makers of Modern Strategy, ed. Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 456.

28 Note: The Battle of the Yalu (1894); the Battles of Santiago and Manila (1898); and Tsushima (1905).

29 White, They Were Expendable, 1.

30 Tarrant, Jutland: The German Perspective, 12.

31 J.D. Kelley, Our Navy (Hartford: The American Publishing Company, 1897), 179.

32 Arthur Marder, From Dreadnought to Scapa Flow: The Royal Navy in the Fisher Era, 1904–1919 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961); Holger Herwig, “The Battlefleet Revolution, 1885–1914,” The Dynamics of Military Revolution, 1300–2050, ed. M. Knox and W. Murray (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); John Jellicoe, The Grand Fleet (New York: George H. Doran, 1919).

33 Samuel Eliot Morison, The Two Ocean War: A Short History of the United States Navy in the Second World War (Boston: Little, Brown, 1963), 3. Though naval gunfire remained key to long-term sea control, it was effective only when protected and screened (until relatively late in the war) by aircraft and submarines. See: Vincent P. O’Hara, The U.S. Navy against the Axis, Surface Combat 1941–1945 (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2007) and James R. FitzSimonds, “Aircraft Carriers versus Battleships in War and Myth: Demythologizing Carrier Air Dominance at Sea,” Journal of Military History, vol 84, July 2020, 843–865.

34 Morison, The Two Ocean War, 3.

35 Corbett, Some Principles of Naval Strategy, 93.

36 Mahan on Naval Warfare, 61.

37 “Civil War Balloon Flights,” Washington Evening Star, January 20, 1931 in NARA-1, RG-45, Box 482; F. Stansbury Haydon, Aeronautics in the Union and Confederate Armies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1941); D.H. Maury, “How the Confederacy Changed Naval Warfare—Ironclads and Torpedoes,” SHSP, vol XXII, 1894, 78–79.

38 S. C. M. Paine, The Japanese Empire: Grand Strategy from the Meiji Restoration to the Pacific War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); The Russo-Japanese War in Global Perspective: World War Zero, ed. John Steinberg et al., (Boston: Brill, 2005).

39 Hughes, Fleet Tactics, 81.

40 For a recent historiographical review of the debate, see: Katherine Epstein, “Reply to Andrew Lambert’s Review,” Journal of Military History, Apr 2019, 83 Issue 2, 651–655.

41 C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2004); Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World; E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: Europe, 1789–1848 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1962).

42 Maier, Leviathan 2.0, 1.

43 Setting aside the debate over whether or not the U.S. Civil War was a “modern” conflict, see: E. Hagerman, The American Civil War and the Origins of Modern Warfare: Ideas, Organization, and Field Command (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988); A. Harvey, “Was the American Civil War the First Modern War?” History, 97 (326), 2012, 272–280; Robert M. Epstein “Patterns of Change and Continuity in Nineteenth-Century Warfare,” The Journal of Military History, 56, no. 3 (Jul., 1992), pp. 375–388.

44 Mallory to Davis, February 27, 1862, Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies [hereafter ORN] (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1894–1914), Series II, vol 2, 151.

45 William Roberts, Now for the Contest: Coastal and Oceanic Naval Operations in the Civil War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), xiv; Raimondo Luraghi, A History of the Confederate Navy (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1996), 69.

46 Biddle, Military Power, 30.

47 And in technical terms, European shipyards had already embraced the principles of armored warfare at sea. See: James Baxter, The Introduction of the Ironclad Warship (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1933).

48 For Laird Rams, note: David Hollett, Men of Iron: The Story of Cammell Laird Shipbuilders 1828–1991, (Rock Ferry, UK: Countyvise Limited, 1992), 12; Bulloch to Mallory, December 18, 1862, ORN Series II, vol 2, 309. The most consequential of the bunch, the CSS Stonewall, made its only substantive military contribution as the first armored warship in the Imperial Japanese Navy. Warships of the Imperial Japanese Navy, 1869–1945, ed. Hansgeorg Jentschura, Dieter Jung, Peter Mickel, (London: Arms and Armour Press, 1977), 12.

49 W.N. Still, Iron Afloat: The Story of the Confederate Armorclads (Columbia: University of South Carolina, 1985).

50 Raphael Semmes, The Cruise of the Alabama and Sumter (New York: Carleton, 1864), 241.

51 R. Semmes, The Confederate Raider Alabama, ed. Philip van Doren Stern, (Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 1962). See also: Frank Merli, The Alabama, British Neutrality and the American Civil War (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2004); Charles Robinson, Shark of the Confederacy: The Story of the CSS Alabama (Annapolis: U.S. Naval Institute Press, 1995); Warren Spencer, The Confederate Navy in Europe (University of Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1983); George W. Dalzell, The Flight From the Flag: The Continuing Effect of the Civil War Upon the American Carrying Trade (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1940), 238.

52 Mahan on Naval Power, 25.

53 D.H. Maury, “How the Confederacy Changed Naval Warfare—Ironclads and Torpedoes,” SHSP, vol XXII, 1894, 78–79; Report on the David, October 7, 1863, ORN Series I, vol 15, 14. “Tomb” is sometimes misspelled as “Toombs.”

54 For “Goliath” see G.T. Beauregard, “Torpedo Service in the Harbor and Water Defences of Charleston,” SHSP, vol V, 1878, 151. The Confederate torpedo boat program even spurred Union imitation in response. Julian McQuiston, William B. Cushing in the Far East: A Civil War Naval Hero Abroad, 1865–1869 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2013); S.P. Lee to Gideon Welles, August 25, 1863, ORN, Series I, vol 9, 181.

55 “Work of Submarine Boats of the CSN,” SHSP, vol XXX, 1902, 164.

56 Luraghi, A History of the Confederate Navy, 249.

57 James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 829.

58 Roberts, Now for the Contest, 170.

59 Viktor Von Scheliha, A Treatise on Coast-Defence (London: E. & F.N. Spon, 1868);《防海新论》[New Theory of Coastal Defense] in 1874, see: 陈先松, 焦海燕, [Chen Xiansong, Jiao Haiyan]《北洋海军购置雷艇考述》[A Study on the Purchasing of Torpedoes by Beiyang Navy]《安徽史学》[Anhui Historical Studies], no. 01 (2017): 121–29.

60 William Columbus Davis, The Last Conquistadores: The Spanish Intervention in Peru and Chile, 1863–1866 (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1950); Alberto Wagner de Reyna, Las Relaciones Diplomáticas entre el Perú y Chile durante el Conflicto con España (Lima: Ediciones del Sol, 1963).

61 Jan S. Breemer, “The Great Race: Innovation and Counter-Innovation at Sea, 1840–1890,” The Corbett Centre for Maritime Policy Studies, January 2011.

62 Baxter, The Introduction of the Ironclad Warship, 21.

63 Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (New York: Scribner, 1976), 1.

64 Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, 149.

65 Mahan on Naval Warfare, 21.

66 Theodore Ropp, The Development of a Modern Navy: French Naval Policy 1871–1904, ed. Stephen Roberts (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1987); Arne Roksund, The Jeune Ecole: The Strategy of the Weak (Boston: Brill, 2007).

67 As used in Ropp, The Development of a Modern Navy, 156.

68 Hugues Canuel, "From a Prestige Fleet to the Jeune Ecole," Naval War College Review (2018) 71: no. 1, Article 7.

69 Ropp, The Development of a Modern Navy, 110.

70 LT J.M. Ellicott, “The Composition of the Fleet,” Proceedings of the USNI, vol XXII, 1896, 542. One wrote directly to William Armstrong to express his concerns. See: Rear Admiral John Wilson to Armstrong, October 1, 1884, Tyne and Wear Archives [hereafter TWA/UK], DF.A/3/20.

71 “The New Warships,” The New York Times, October 6, 1885. See also: J.O. Hopkins to William Armstrong, October 7, 1884, DF.A/3/11, TWA/UK; Rendel to Armstrong, December 5, 1884, DF.A/1/275-7, TWA/UK.

72 Map of Trade, Naval Intelligence Directorate, The National Archives, Admiralty Files [hereafter TNA/ADM] 231/16, 16, no. 210, 225.

73 Eleanor C. Barnes, Alfred Yarrow His Life and Work, (London: Edward Arnold & Co, 1923), 73; “Torpedo Steam Launch,” Times (London, England) February 1, 1875.

74 “France: Regulations for the Torpedo Service of the Five Military Ports: 1885: Translations from the Bulletin Officiel de la Marine,” TNA/ADM 231/9 (1886).

75 “Defense Mobile,” Bulletin Officiel de la Marine TNA/ADM 231/9 (1886).

76 Ropp, The Development of a Modern Navy, 159, 255.

77 Ibid, 255.

78 Ibid, 165.

79 Ibid, 159.

80 Dirk Bönker, Militarism in a Global Age: Naval Ambitions in Germany and the United States before World War I (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012); Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (New York: Harper, 2014), 147. See also: John Arquilla, “A Study in Technology Strategy: The Curious Case of Alfred von Tirpitz,” Comparative Strategy, 2017, 36, no. 2, 143–152.

81 Clark, The Sleepwalkers, 148; James Joll, The Origins of the First World War (Harlow: Longman, 1984), 74–75.

82 Fiction writers certainly speculated. See: Fred. T Jane, Blake of the Rattlesnake: Or the Man Who Save England (London: Tower Publishing, 1895); A. Nelson Seaforth (AKA George S. Clarke), The Last Great Naval War: An Historical Retrospect (London: Cassell and Company, 1891); William Laird Clowes, Captain of the Mary Rose: A Tale of Tomorrow (London: Tower Publishing, 1892).

83 D.P. Menefee, “General Notes on Ships of the Japanese Navy after Battle of Yalu,” January 13, 1895, NARA-1, RG-45, Box 460.

84 William Sims, December No Date, 1894, Sims Papers, Personal Correspondence Box 3, Library of Congress.

85 S. C. M. Paine, The Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895: Perceptions, Power and Primacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

86 Bruce Elleman, Modern Chinese Warfare, 1795–1989 (New York: Routledge, 2001), 85. 李平子[Li Pingzi]《从鸦片战争到甲午战争》[From the Opium War to the Sino-Japanese War] (上海: 华东师范大学出版社, 1998), 455; John R. Rawlinson, China’s Struggle for Naval Development, 1839–1895 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967).

87 陈悦 [Chen Yue]《北洋海军》[The North Sea Fleet] (济南: 山东画报出版社, 2015); “Introduction to Notes on the Imperial Japanese Navy,” and “Introduction to Notes on the Imperial Chinese Navy,” in Notes on the Navies of the Lesser-European, Asiatic and South and Central American States (1887), ONI, Security Classified Publications 1882–1954, NARA-1, RG-38, Entry 141, Box 26, NM-63, Entry 141. Though by 1894 dissenting voices had doubts, see: “China-Japan War: Narrative of the Naval Engagement Off the Yalu River with Remarks Thereon,” No 416, March, 1895, TNA/ADM 231/25.

88 《海東耀武》[Our Glorious Military on the Eastern Sea] Shenbao, July 5, 1891.

89 “Rumors,” North China Herald, July 20, 1894. For a similar discourse see:《西人論華兵可用》[Westerners Discuss Chinese Military Capabilities], Shenabo (Shanghai), August 12, 1894.

90 T. Roosevelt to Hilary Herbert, December 12, 1894, “Deductions Drawn from the Yaloo Fight Sketch of the Ting Yuen Showing Punishment Received,” NARA-1, RG-45, Box 460.

91 Hilary Herbert, “Military Lessons of the Chino-Japanese War,” The North American Review, 160 (1895). NID reports credited Japan’s “immense superiority of gunfire,” for the victory but nonetheless noted that “the barbettes of the two Chinese ironclads were practically intact after the action.” See: “China-Japan War: Narrative of the Naval Engagement Off the Yalu River with Remarks Thereon,” March 1895, no. 416, TNA/ADM 231/25.

92 Report of the USN Surgeon General, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Navy 1895, 513.

93 H.C. Taylor, “Report of the President of the Naval War College and Torpedo School,” Annual Report of the Secretary of the Navy 1895, 167.

94 Philo McGiffin, "The Battle of the Yalu," Century Illustrated Magazine, no. 4 (1895): 585; Lee McGiffin, Yankee of the Yalu: Philo Norton McGiffin, American Captain in the Chinese Navy (1885–1895) (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1968), 57.

95 “The English Mail Papers,” North China Herald, (Shanghai), October 5, 1894.

96 《甲午战争有关奏折史料》[Memorials and Historical Materials Relating to the Sino-Japanese War] in《清末海軍史料》[Late Qing Navy Historical Materials], 张侠 ed. [Zhang Xia, et al] (北京: 海洋出版社, 1982), 336.

97 L.P. Trench to Foreign Office, October 24, 1894, no. 386, TNA/FO-881/6605.

98 Shumpei Okamoto, Impressions of the Front: Woodcuts of the Sino-Japanese War, 1894–1895 (Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1983), 44.

99 戚其章 [Qi Qizhang]《甲午战争史》[History of the Sino-Japanese War] (北京: 人民出版社, 1990), 416.

100 Annex G, “War Between China and Japan,” TNA/ADM 189/15 (1895).

101 Punch (London, UK), August 11, 1894.

102 Paul Kennedy “Military Effectiveness in the First World War,” in Millett, et al., The Effectiveness of Military Organizations, vol I (Boston: Allen & Uwin, 1988), 335.

103 Siegfried Sassoon, “Attack,” The New Oxford Book of English Verse, 862.

104 See: N. J. M. Campbell, Jutland: An Analysis of the Fighting (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1986); Paul G Halpern, A Naval History of World War I (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1994); Lawrence Sondhaus, The Great War at Sea: A Naval History of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Richard Alexander Hough, The Great War at Sea, 1914–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983); Keith Yates, Flawed Victory: Jutland 1916 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2000); Tarrant, Jutland: The German Perspective; Daniel Allen Butler, Distant Victory: The Battle of Jutland and the Allied Triumph in the First World War (London: Praeger Security International, 2006); Julian Stafford Corbett, Naval Operations, vol III, (London, New York: Longmans, Green, 1923). For “most studied” see Keegan, The First World War, 272.

105 Joll, The Origins of the First World War, 75; Clark, The Sleepwalkers, 147. For naval race see: Robert Massie, Castles of Steel: Britain, Germany and the Winning of the Great War at Sea (New York: Random House, 2003); Arthur Marder, The Anatomy of British Sea Power: A History of British Naval Policy in the Pre-Dreadnought Era, 1880–1905 (New York: Knopf, 1940); Holger H. Herwig, "Luxury Fleet": The Imperial Germany Navy, 1888–1918 (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1980).

106 Corbett, Naval Operations, vol III, 329; Keegan, The First World War, 269.

107 Tarrant, Jutland: The German Perspective, 55–57.

108 Keegan, The First World War, 262; Tarrant, Jutland: The German Perspective, 98.

109 Tarrant, Jutland: The German Perspective, 161.

110 Yates, Flawed Victory, 290.

111 Keegan, The First World War, 262.

112 After all, as Churchill famously observed, John Jellicoe was, “the only man on either side could lose the war in an afternoon.” As quoted by Niall Ferguson, War of the World: Twentieth Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 113.

113 William White, as used by Yates, Flawed Victory, 26.

114 Churchill, as used in Butler, Distant Victory, 223.

115 Keegan, The First World War, 265.

116 Yates, Flawed Victory, 287.

117 Ibid, 244.

118 Tarrant, Jutland: The German Perspective, 167; Yates, Flawed Victory, xviii.

119 Hughes, Fleet Tactics, 85.

120 Paul Kennedy noted it was exactly in this period that “the submarine had developed from being regarded as being purely a coastal defence vessel into the greatest threat to Britain’s naval mastery.” Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery, 249.

121 Jan Rüger, Heligoland: Britain, Germany, and the Struggle for the North Sea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 136.

122 Luraghi, A History of the Confederate Navy, 249.

123 Though it is difficult to disentangle this strategic shift with the economic hardship wrought by the economic blockade. See: Eric San, “Desperate Measures: The Effects of Economic Isolation on Warring Powers,” Texas National Security Review, vol 3, Issue 2, Spring 2020.

124 Tarrant, Jutland: The German Perspective, 44.

125 “Romantic and Sanguinary Cruise of the Emden,” El Paso Herald, January 12, 1915; “Emden, Germany’s Sea Terror is Destroyed in the Bay of Bengal,” The Star-Independent (Harrisburg, PA), November 10, 1914. See also: Edwin Palmer Hoyt, The Last Cruise of the Emden (New York: Macmillan, 1966).

126 Tarrant, Jutland: The German Perspective, 40.

127 Joll, The Origins of the First World War, 75.

128 Keegan, Intelligence in War, 257.

129 Keegan, The First World War, 265.

130 Keegan, Intelligence in War, 258; Yates, Flawed Victory, 251.

131 Keegan, Intelligence in War, 257; Hughes, Fleet Tactics, 81.

132 Keegan, Intelligence in War, 256. See also: Werner Rahn, “The War at Sea in the Atlantic and in the Arctic Ocean,” Germany and the Second World War: The Global War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Karl Dönitz, “The Conduct of the War at Sea,” Division of Naval Intelligence (1946) Naval History and Heritage Command.

133 Jeffery. J Safford, Wilsonian Maritime Diplomacy 1913–1921 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1978). For Yamato see: O’Hara, The U.S. Navy Against the Axis, 4.

134 Military Innovation in the Interwar Period, ed. Williamson Murray and Allan Millett (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2021); Stephen K. Stein, From Torpedoes to Aviation: Washington Irving Chambers & Technological Innovation in the New Navy 1876 to 1913 (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2007); William M. McBride, Technological Change and the United States Navy, 1865–1945 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); Craig Felker, Testing American Sea Power: U.S. Navy Strategic Exercises, 1923–1940 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2007).

135 John Kuehn, Agents of Innovation, (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2013); Douglas Ford, Elusive Enemy (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2011), 15–47.

136 Charles Melhorn, Two-Block Fox: The Rise of the Aircraft Carrier, 1911–1929 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1974), ii.

137 Knox, “The United States Navy Between the World Wars,” in Samuel Eliot Morison, The History of United States Naval Operation in World War II, vol I, (Boston: Little Brown and Co., 1949), liii.

138 Morison, The History of United States Naval Operation in World War II, vol IV, 189.

139 Rahn, “The War at Sea in the Atlantic and in the Arctic Ocean,” 171; Keegan, Intelligence in War, 255.

140 Gordon Casserly, The Land of the Boxers (London, 1903), 8.

141 Ernest J. King, US Navy at War 1941–1945: Official Reports by Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King (Washington: United States Navy Department, 1946), 99.

142 King, US Navy at War 1941–1945, 169.

143 Proceedings of the U.S. Naval Institute, August 2019, 145/8/1,398; P.W. Singer and August Cole, Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015); I.F. Clarke, “Future-War Fiction: The First Main-Phase, 1871–1900,” Science Fiction Studies, 24, no. 3 (Nov., 1997), 387–412.

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Tommy Jamison

Dr. Tommy Jamison ([email protected]) is a military historian and Asst Professor of Strategic Studies in the Defense Analysis Dept, Naval Postgraduate School. His work explores the history of naval development and conflict in the Pacific, with an emphasis on technological shifts and institutional adaptation. He holds a PhD (2020) and MA (2017) in International History from Harvard University. From 2009 to 2014, Dr. Jamison served as a naval officer in both the Western Pacific and Afghanistan.